Baptism, Just a Ritual?

1 Epiphany B January 7, 2024
Genesis 1:1-5 Ps. 29
Acts 9:1-7 Mark 1:4-11

Lectionary Link

Today is the feast of the baptism of our Lord, and one of the principle occasions for baptism within the church.

And it may be a day for cynics to say, "baptism is just a ritual, games which Christians play signifying nothing practical for the good of the world, so why do it?"

The same cynic might be one who faithfully wears the same unwashed sweat shirt when his favorite team plays so as not to jinx the possibility of victory.  This irrational repetition might seem disconnected logically from any actual effect upon the outcome of any athletic contest.

If one says that "baptism is just a ritual," one could also say that human beings are ritualistic by nature.  That is, human being engage in repetitions as grooved habits performing the energy of human desire.  And if human beings are ritualistic by nature, then the judgments about ritual behavior concern whether such rituals give orientation into human excellence.

Baptism is sacrament and it is a ritual of Christian initiation.  The lack of appreciation for baptismal meanings, might come from the rote social practice of baptism as but a requirement of family and church.  To baptize without articulating the anthropological soundness of baptism, leaves the ritual practice unconnected from human life cycle practices.

Today is a good day to ponder the meanings of our baptism and the meaning of baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist.

Baptism is an event of human solidarity.  Such solidarity might expressed in statements of reciprocity:  We want you to be with us.  And I want to be with you.

Such reciprocity might be expressed on another level when it comes to the meaning of the baptism of Jesus.  "God, we want you to be with us."  And God's Jesus says, "I want to be you, not as a general theory, but as specific person in time with a specific community, the community of John the Baptist."  And one of the names of Jesus which the New Testament writer borrowed from the prophet Isaiah was Emmanuel, or "God with us."

The event of the baptism is an event in the divine becoming one in solidarity with humanity, specific with Jesus, so as to signal that God's solidarity with each of us as children of God, is specific to the particular history and circumstances of our own life.  The general, "God is with us," becomes the specific "God is with you and me in the times and places of our lives."

Baptism is significant because human identity discovery and formation is a central feature of life.  Baptism is an event of value structuralization through language.  The chief feature of human solidarity is that we have language.  Language is structure in the values and judgments of our life.  In the event of baptism, the Christian community is declaring their values of how to be human in the very best possible way.  And how are those values expressed in the baptismal liturgy?  Humans originate from the greatness of God and reflect that greatness by bearing the divine image.  In the Risen Christ that divine image can be known within us as our chief identity.  As humans, we are loved by God, and forgiven perfectible, but not perfect beings.  We are gifted by God in discovering our creative purpose and our benefit for the good of the community.

Baptism then is the expression of our vision of what enlightened human solidarity means.  Baptism is an expression our our ideals as the lure for the energy of desire to target as our life vocation.

And if baptism is ignored or scorned, it must be said that other ritual behaviors will replace the profound meanings encoded in baptismal practice.  Such replacement to baptismal values will be governed by self-centered behaviors or solidarities of tribalism for exclusive group privilege.

Let us today not treat baptism as a cute little ceremony for a family gathering and baby pictures in passed down baptismal gowns.  Let us articulate in teaching and lifestyle with the expression of profound solidarity with the highest kinds of community values, namely, Christ is God with us and in us as the hope of glory.  Amen.

Word as First Principle of Humanity

1 Christmas B      December 31, 2023
Is.61:10-62:3     Ps. 147:13-21
Gal. 3:23-25,4:4-7  John 1:1-18

Lectionary Link

We can try to imagine a world without words and language, but we can only do so by using language.

We can observe babies and animals not conversing with us and try to imagine their "unlanguaged" states, but we have to use language to do so.

As adults we can try to remember what it was like to be in the womb or to be babies without language, but we only do so by retrospectively imposing a language upon our natal state and pretend to translate what we must have felt like or how we might have described our state of infancy when we did not have language ability.

We might even describe the state of not having language as as state of unformed seeming random void.

Imagine the frustrated void of the very young Helen Keller before she was initiated into the world of language.  Her caretakers could only observe her struggles and her frustrations and anger and they could only make her a passive person of their own linguistic projections, even with profound empathy.

The beginning or birth of her life in a poignant way was when her tutor, Anne Sullivan, initiated her into the world of language.  When her naming ability was released, she became a language user and she became the co-creator of her world to be known by her in only the way in which she could know it.  Ms. Sullivan has been called the "miracle worker" for her midwifery of the young Helen into words, language, and achieving naming ability.

If we can appreciate the event of Helen Keller being initiated into her native language ability, then we can understand perhaps some of the most profound words in the Bible: "In the beginning was the Word...."  The book of beginning, the book of Genesis, assumes that everything began with words authored by a Supreme Language User.  And God said, "Let there be light.....and there was light."  So the creation story is told about God as a speaker, and the Spirit who makes flesh the words of the Creator, makes externally existent the vast order of creation.  And between Creating God as Word Speaker and the Spirit as the Ultimate 3-D printer of the world, the Word was the source of all words, and this Word was confessed by the early Christians as Christ the eternal Word from the Beginning.

Rather than reducing sublime poetry about Christ to a crassly linear history of a world with a vastness that will ever leave us mystified, even as we think that we know more and better our little patch of that world, we can appreciate the poetry of the Christ-nature of all things.  In Pauline poetry, Christ is confessed as all and in all.  That is a poetically possibility if Christ is understood to be the Word from the beginning.

The Greek word for beginning is "arche."  This word can also refer to in Greek philosophy as the first principle.  Modern science in the effort to find a unified answer for everything, always, all at once, posits a big bang beginning as a way of articulating a basement starting point, but even then rhetorically we must confess that it is still "turtles all the way down," even under the basement of a theoretical big bang.

As people of faith, we are more interested in the art of living and such an art involves integrating the wonderful insights of science, while maintaining our side of wonder based upon the experience of sheer Plenitude which mixes the simple and the complex in an infinite number of ways.

As people of faith, we can appreciate the First Principle of humanity is that we have language; that we are constituted by the language of our lives.  We are language users in a way that makes us different among the other creatures and entities of life.  Other creatures and entities have their own modes of interrelation and communication which we can observe and speculate about from our own language perspective; but we know that we have being and knowable relationship by virtue of being people with language.  Language creates human life as we know it and knowing this should help us appreciate the insight of The Great Word being equivalent with God.  Or as the Gospel of John declares in John's Christmas Story: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

In this great insight, we can appreciate That Word or Language is co-extensive with what is none greater than can be conceived, as in the ontological definition of God expounded by St. Anselm.

Word is how the Everything, Always, All at Once, gets parsed into the limitations placed upon us by Time.  An reservoir of infinite words is worthless unless those words can have instantiations within the times of actual language users.

And so we have the poetic and philosophical Bethlehem in the Gospel of John:  And the Word, (that is the Word that is God), was made, became manifest, was funneled into a fleshly person, and lived dwelled with us.   This is another expression of the emptying of the Plenitude into parseable human portions and simultaneously human experience is elevated as a valid way to come to know the horizon event of humanity whom we can come to confess God to be.

The Word was made flesh....Word constitutes our inward life because we name the geography of what is happening within us;  Word also constitute the world of our landscape and our interactions with it.  Through Him (the Word), everything was created and has being.  This is profound first principle, to have the insight that our life as being human is founded in a unique way by virtue of us having language.

And if we are constituted by language, the art of living has to do with each person finding the very best voice of their lives, the voice to love God, to love one's neighbor and to love oneself.

The very best of Word, is still attempting to lure us to use and be guided by the very best words of our lives.   We are hindered in this because we have learned some losing scripts which keep us trapped into acting out in less than ideal ways.  

We believe in Spirit because we believe that the invisible world of words within us needs to be re-ordered and constituted or constantly relearned to be made better flesh in us in the body language deeds of our lives, even the deeds of love and justice.

On this last day of the year, let us commit ourselves to the process of the Word being made flesh again within our speech acts, our writing, and within the body language of our lives.  When we as a group of people commit ourselves to finding the Voice of the words of love and justice inundating our lives, we will arise to be co-creators in the tremendous work of love and justice which needs to be done in our world.

Let us commit ourselves in the new year to the best words of our lives, following Jesus who was exemplary word made flesh.  Amen.

Empire Christianity and the Birth of Christ

Christmas Eve B  December 24, 2023                                           

Isaiah 9:2-7 Psalm 96                                                                   

Titus 2:11-14  Luke 2:1-14

Lectionary Link

If we are warm, well-fed, clothed, sheltered, money a plenty, safe, protected, and able to indulge in all kinds of Christmas season excesses tonight, how are we going to appropriate an identity with the Christmas story tonight?

Perhaps we are more honestly identified with the privileged members of the Roman Empire who enjoyed the benefits provided by their being members of the Emperor's wide sprawling entourage.

No one of any status was on the look out for a lowly couple in journey who could not find proper shelter for a woman in the late stages of her pregnancy.  The Emperor-identified people were on the side of the tax collectors, who according to the story caused the journey back home to Bethlehem for the census to verify the number of potential tax payers.

For the most part, we as American Christians have been in comfortable lifestyles, like those in who were identified with the  Emperor and having influence, safety, power, and privilege.  In the history of our American Christians ancestors we know that  they forced the Christian message upon people who lived more closely with the oppressed circumstances of Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus.  Early American Christians brought the message of the love of Jesus to the people who were already in our land, and to the slaves who were forcefully brought to our land.  To these people, we brought the love of Jesus rather ironically with the hypocritical "do as Jesus did, but not as we are doing to you."  

Why would this preacher be so negative about our hypocrisy on this Christmas eve, of all nights?

To remind us about the total irony of the Christmas Story.

God's unique Son is born into a family of nobodies who were so less than ordinary that they would be unnoticed.

But what does the Christmas Story do?  It promotes a realm of understanding about this seeming ordinary birth with magical realism.  The Roman Senate does not confer upon Jesus the title god or son of a god, rather a heavenly choral senate of angels register their affirmation of the divine child through songs and a massive light show, and for whom, for a senate or court of influential people?  No, but lowly shepherds get the first scoop and first invitation to birth site.  Lowly shepherds are the nobility of heaven's kingdom.

But can people of means, power, knowledge, and privilege also have access to this special birth?  Enter the foreign magi, persons of wisdom and means; they too are included in the invitation to the site of the special birth.

But this birth of one who is called God's special child has its opposition.  Herod must uphold the Emperor's exclusive right of being humanly divine, and opponents must be eliminated.  There is open opposition to the meaning of this special birth.  Ironically, when everyone is God's child by virtue of God's image upon us, it becomes silly for people to compete over such designation.

Friends, how can we appropriate this Christmas story tonight in our time and in our lives, indeed a time when the current dangers of war has shut down Bethlehem for Christmas?  The good news of the Christmas story tonight is to receive the birth of the Christ again and again as the continuous opportunity for conversion to our better selves, yes even the selves who would see that no poor couple would be left in the cold but would be taken care of with the best possible health care.

The opportunity awaits us tonight for the birth of Christ to convert people in all kinds of situations, rich, poor, of different ethnicities, religious, social, economic, and educational conditions.  And how shall our conversion of Christ be known tonight?  By the harmonious reciprocity between ourselves.  Rather than the birth of Christ be but a reminder of our own past failures and hypocrisy in being Christ-like, we should see this Christmas Eve as opportunity to more fuller conversion in being more Christ-like with each other.  And being more Christ-like might mean some social and economic leveling where the rich find the poor as the fulfillment of their destiny to be more perfect sharers of the gifts of their lives.

Let us celebrate the birth of Christ tonight in us through the evidence of Christ-like behaviors in us that bring love, peace, and justice to fruition in our world.

Merry Birth of Christ in you tonight.  Amen.

The Annunciation as Mystagogy

4 Advent B December 24, 2023
2 Samuel 7:4,8-16 Ps.89
Romans 16:25-27 Luke 1:26-38

Lectionary Link

The Annunciation is the account of the angel Gabriel addressing Mary with the "Hail, Mary."  "Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you."  And in this account we can find the entire mystagogy of the church encapsulated.

Mystagogy is the instruction into the mysteries of Christ.  The Jesus Movement was built upon the continual happening of the sublime experiences which were occurring within many persons who were having them following the preaching and teaching of the followers of Jesus Christ.

St. Paul, who wrote long before the Annunciation story came to its mystagogic form, wrote "Christ in you, the hope of glory."  Christ in you, the experience of the interior sublime identity whereby one realizes that one is a child of God.

Paul wrote mystical theology for these interior events which were spontaneously occurring in many people, even as he himself who never saw Jesus had a profound interior event with the Risen Christ.  The Jesus Movement was founded upon the mysticism of these profound interior experiences and the interpretations given for these experiences was the experience of the Risen Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit.

By the time the Gospels were written, there were gathering communities of people who had had this sublime experience of interior identity and they understood this as knowing themselves following Jesus, as beloved children of God.

The presence of the Gospels, written in an accessible language to many people in the Roman Empire, represents the institutionalization of the message because of the recurrence of these experiences of being identified with Christ.

How could this spiritual experience be promulgated and taught?  How could it be hidden within a narrative, a story about exterior events which encoded the interior event of "Christ in you, the hope of glory?"  How did they believe that these recurring interior Christ events were happening?  They believed that they occurred because of a heavenly word and message.  They believe it happened because of what they called a baptism, an immersion, in the Holy Spirit.  They believed that each person could be overshadowed by the Holy Spirit and have the life of Christ conceived within their interior beings.

The mystagogues of the early Jesus Movement were Gospel writers.  They encoded the very mystery of Christ in you, within a narrative of Jesus of Nazareth.  The origin of Jesus is also the origin of each person who is conceived or born by the power of the Spirit, who becomes like a reiteration of the Spirit combining with mere dust creating the human being as God's child.

The word angel means messenger, and Gabriel is the personified messenger, signifying that each person is given a unique initiation into their identity event with God.  One is hailed by God's messenger into the reality of our realization as children of God.  Mary, is paradigmatic of the Christ in you experience.  Christ became in Mary, conceived by the over-shadowing of the Holy Spirit; it was not physical event involving the male seed.  One's spiritual birth is not one's physical birth, but it is a birth which happens because we are physically born with the potential of realizing our spiritual deep down God identity.

The Annunciation account is spiritual word art of the Jesus Movement encoding the reality of mystical union with God in Christ as the Christ nature arises within those who are willing to let that identity become the chief identity of their lives.

Mary is hailed by the messenger, she is favored by God because of the event which is going to happen within her, and this event which replicated in the souls forever will bespeak the blessedness of this event for all generations.

The Annunciation is the proclamation par excellence of "Christ in you, the hope of Glory!"  The Gospel for you and I today is to humbly embrace this sublime event within us and say with Mary, "Let it be according to your word."  Amen.

Rejoice, Anyway

3 Advent b December 17, 2023, 3 Advent
Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11 Psalm 126
1 Thessalonians 5:16-24 John 1:6-8,19-28

Lectionary Link


The cauldron of the probabilities of what has happened, is happening, might have happened, did not happen, will happen, will have happened, is very full, yes teemingly full.  And some happenings are so horrifying that they can monopolize our thinking and energy into neglecting the reality of them being but mere happenings within the totality of everything happening.

What is happening to me right now can easily be generalized to characterize what is happening to all, and everything.

How do we live without generalizing our selfish interpretations of what is happening to me or us, and projecting our small interpretations as being the significant truth of everything?

The third Sunday in Advent is Gaudete Sunday, Rejoice Sunday.  It is an invitation to access the deep experience of joy as a way to live in relationship to everything that has and is happening.

But how can I have joy with the senseless war in Ukraine with many dying and a tyrant wanting to overrun a country because megalomanical disease?  How can I rejoice with the horrendous events in Israel, Gaza, Syria, and the complete impossibility of exacting precise justice to offending parties in real time resulting in bombing not being very smart but very indiscriminate among innocent people who end up being in harms way?

How can I rejoice in a country of relative plenty where people with a lot get much more and people with a little get much less?  How can I rejoice facing my own guilt of having plenty while accepting general helplessness of getting enough to those who need it?

The life conditions of the truly free play of probabilities means that life is always ambiguous in what might actually happen to us and to other people in our world.  How do we live best with the actual probable conditions?

Well, practically we adopt the best wisdom of probability living, namely, statistically approximation, which simply means we apply good actuarial thinking of what has happen onto what might happen in the future.  But we know that even good wise planning and good scientific thinking cannot guarantee future specific outcomes in our personal, social, and national lives.

What is required is to tap into the two inwardly known virtues of faith and joy to accompany us in our living with the probable conditions of what is and what may happen.

Jesus came to people who were oppressed people, people who were often trying to perform religious duties like the proverbial arranging of deck chairs on the sinking Titanic.  How can we live when it seems like the entire world is going down, sinking for me and my people who are living in the distressed conditions?

How can the people of Pauline churches live as tiny majorities within the cities which were dominated by the cult of Emperor?   Paul had the audacity to write, "Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances..."   Paul are you crazy, how can we do this?

Most of the biblical literature was written by and for oppressed people.  Most of white European Christianity has known the legacy of Christendom and Empire Christianity who have been more on the side of the oppressor than the oppressed.  And people on the winning sides of Empire Christianity need to be careful in how they appropriate a literature written during time of oppression and for people who were oppressed.

Our American founding documents invite everyone to the life goal of a pursuit of happiness.  Happiness is a valid quest if we regard freedom from all manner of pain to be what is normal for us psychologically and socially.  But on the pursuit of happiness we know that happiness often depends upon what happens, and so we and many are often unhappy in life.  We can hope that the experience of unhappiness builds within us grooves of empathy to help us aid others in their pursuit of happiness, especially when events of unhappiness occur.

John the Baptist, baptized, and so built a community of baptized people who practiced together the pursuit living lives of excellence.  John the Baptist predicted that Jesus would baptize with a Spirit and this Spirit would create a community.

How do we reconcile joy and happiness since joy is an underneath condition which can be experienced even when happiness is not our current experience?  Joy is the embracing of everything, all at once experience which totally relativizes the power and the effect of any specific thing which might be happening to us.  Joy is the experience of ultimate togetherness, and it is poignantly known in the mutual support of being in community together.  John the Baptist could baptize people into a community of mutual support during hard times.  Paul could tell his flock to rejoice, because of their covenant with each other to be together, no matter what happen to them while they tried to fly under the radar of the cult of the Emperor.

The Gospel, the good news for us, is to rejoice, which means learning to tap into the very native joy of having been born and having consciousness, but also of living in the Spirit with a community of people who share with us the conditions of the free probabilities what might happen to any of us at anytime.

Let us in our spiritual practice today discover how to access the All, of everything, all at once, impinging upon us deeply as the experience of joy.  And from this joy, let us go forth to live together with what may happen, and be thankful for the many occasions of happiness which have and will come our way.  The Risen Christ within us as the All in all, is our source of Joy.  Amen.

The Gospel of John the Baptist

2 Advent b December 10, 2023
Is. 40:1-11 Psalm 85:1-2,8-13
2 Peter 3:8-15a,18 Mark 1:1-8

Lectionary Link

The sheer amount of ink given to John the Baptist in the Gospels should be a marker of how important he was for the those in the early Jesus Movement who were responsible for generating the Gospel writings.

We can assume that John the Baptist originated a community of people, one which has persisted even to modern times.  And why would the community of John the Baptist be important to the Gospel writers?

First, the Gospels tells us that some early church leaders had previously been followers of John the Baptist.  There is also a succession event that is recorded in the Gospels:  The Baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist in the Jordan River.  Was Jesus a part of the movement of John the Baptist?  Did Jesus have a similar wilderness training like John the Baptist in his formative period, the first thirty years of his life of which we have very little in records, except a birth narrative and one boyhood event in the Temple?

John the Baptist is given some comparative analysis with the life of Jesus by the Gospel writers.  He has a birth narrative.  He has accounts of his ministry and his message.  He has a passion, a record of his imprisonment and death.  

According to the Gospel words of Jesus, who was he?  He was something of a reincarnation of the prophet Elijah, you know, the one who did not die but was spirited to heaven in a chariot of fire, perhaps so his spirit could return and be visualized at the Mount of the Transfiguration and be present in the ministry of John the Baptist.

The Gospel record that crowds went out to the Jordan River to hear him and to be baptized by him.

So, John the Baptist and his community were important to Jesus, and to the followers of Jesus.

We might even conclude that the community of John the Baptist was like the proto-church, a model for a new kind of separate community.  The followers of John the Baptist formed into what might be called a counter-cultural movement, borrowing and innovating water baptism as a new rite of initiation into a group that was not specifically attached to the synagogue or the Temple; it was indeed a counter-religious community, but one which seem to draw a following from diverse sectors of people in Palestine.  And this indeed would be a precursor of the identity and composition of the Jesus Movement which became churches in various locales throughout the Roman Empire.

The Gospel writings have functions and purposes.  One of the most prominent purposes of the Gospel writings was an appeal to the members of the community of John the Baptist to make a transition to become members of the Jesus Movement.  This motive would account for the special importance which the community of John the Baptist had for the leaders of the Jesus Movement.  The community of John the Baptist was a specific target for the communication efforts of the leaders of the Jesus Movement.

So, John is presented as the set up man for Jesus.  He is presented as the transitional figure for embracing the surpassing figure of Jesus of Nazareth.  John is the water baptizer and repentance teacher; Jesus is the Holy Spirit baptizer and the Resurrection life giver.

John the Baptism represents the liminal phase between Temple and synagogue and the Jesus Movement which became gathered churches.

We highlight John the Baptist during the season of Advent because we understand this as a season of preparation for both the celebration of the first coming of Jesus in his birth, but also for the subsequent comings of Jesus in his Risen Christ future.

The life of John the Baptist might be characterized by the word "fast."  Advent is a fasting season.  Fasting is the discipline of simplifying our priorities toward what is most important in personal and community values.  While in our secular culture, the Christmas parties of excess have already begun, we need to keep in mind the spirit of Advent fasting.  In our end of year fasting, we reorganize our resources, giving to charities and non-profits who are committed to get resources to those who need them direly.  We fast from gross excess to reallocate our resources for those who need them and we are reminded that the Son of Man is to be recognized in the giving to those who bear the presence of Christ poignantly in their very situation of need.

Let us embrace the fasting and rebuking of John the Baptist today as a reminder that we need consistent and intermittent fasting for our own physical and spiritual health, but also for the constant reorganizational redistribution of the resources of plenty to be shared with those have been bearing the involuntary fasts of being in need.

May God help us embrace the grace of the Advent season of fasting to benefit our physical and spiritual health, and move our world toward the gigantic redistribution of resources which is needed for us to affirm our belief and practice of love and justice.  Amen.

Having Genres of the Future

1 Advent Cycle b December 3, 2023
Is. 64:1-9 Psalm 80:1-7
1 Cor.1:1-9 Mark 13:24-37

Lectionary Link

To be human is to be a futurist.  We live toward the future.  We live toward the events which will be after now.

How we regard the future is highly conditioned by how we understand our current conditions and how we have integrated our past experiences.  We project what the future might be in not-yet scenarios.  We extrapolate from the past and present what a future might look like.

Our futurisms take many forms which are consistent with the discursive varieties in our lives.  Scientific futurism is different from aesthetic and artistic futurism which share more discursive habits with religious futurism.

In science the concerns is not really about ethics or spirituality or entertainment; in science the rule of statistical approximation prevails.  From observing and charting the behavior of "things," laws of consistency are derived and the guiding assumption is that the conditions will be so similar in the future that accuracy of prediction is guaranteed.  We should all be thankful for this kind of reliable futurism since it provides us with the most practical method of planning in our lives.

But there is also a futurism which inspires differently than science.  Not all human events are as reliable and predictable as the rising of the sun or the boiling of water; the events of how human beings treat each other manifest a wide range of fickleness.  We can treat each other with kindness or love or we can be extremely cruel on the personal level or on the level of social units of family, tribes, and nations.

Much of the biblical literature was generated in times of distress for biblical writers and their communities.  The leaders of these distressed people could not rely upon a predication of a better tomorrow because no relief from oppression seemed imminent.

They had to live on the fumes of hope, the kind of hope which could inspire a program of visualization in words of what love and justice could mean for them.  These prophets of the visualization of hope used utopian language, magic realism, super-heroes, and what we call the apocalyptic genre.

Jesus arrived within a community of people whose identity was significantly formed by the apocalyptic mode of thinking.  Why?  Jesus and his friends knew that life could be significantly better than what they experienced.  Their literature revealed to them about a time during the reign of King David, when they had much better conditions, and they longed for future conditions to be like or better than they were during the reign of King David.  There were other writings besides the Hebrew Scriptures which expounded this apocalyptic futurism for an oppressed and suffering people.

If the future were to be better for the oppress people of the community of Jesus, there needed to be super heroes who were greater than the Caesars and the military surrogates of the Caesar.  The earthly power of the Caesars seemed to be so formidable that interventions of super non-earthly powers were needed to put things right, or more selfishly, to deliver the oppressed people.  The names of the super heroes in the time of Jesus were Messiah and the Son of Man.  These super God blessed heroes were visions of how thing could be put right.

The writer of Mark's Gospel understood that Jesus identified with this figure referred to as the Son of Man.  This super hero was a visualization of a God appointed and God powered person to establish judgment and justice for the oppressed people of the world.

Our nay saying sides could say, "it didn't happen, it hasn't happened, and it probably won't happen in such a way."  The skeptics might say that such people are to be pitied for believing such stuff, especially if they are taking it literally.

But as one who argues for the functional purpose of every discursive practice, I would say that such discourse is not meant to be taken literally, but literarily.  It is a discourse of visualization of the end of pain and distress even as a pain counselor at a cancer clinic might devise visualizations techniques for people of different ages to deal with the pain and reality of their terminal disease.  The discourse is true to human hope even while the images do not comport to the empirical verification standards of science.

While we moderns might feel superior to these poor purveyors of the apocalyptic, we should confront ourselves with the reality that we in our situation are far more futuristic and apocalyptic than the biblical writers ever were.  Super heroes of Marvel Comics dominate our lives, science fiction, and action adventure in the cinema draw big audiences.  The "art" of the future in its many genres are part of our lives.  We regard it to be artistic entertainment, even while as skeptics we don't allow the biblical apocalyptic to be a part of the analgesic and entertaining aspect of their lives in their experience of oppression.  Many people wrongly think that "entertainment and the aesethetic" were not valid modes of being for biblical peoples.  Shame on us for allowing ourselves such pervasive genres of futurism, while denying it to biblical people because of the biblical literalists who misappropriate the functional purpose of the apocalyptic genre of futurism.

The Gospel for us during Advent is to let hope visualize a better world, with better realized justice, and with persons of surpassing virtue to call us to our future surpassing selves.

Let us appreciate the genres of futurism which are in the Bible, in the Gospel, in the words of Jesus, and in that appreciation let us be honest about the genres of futurism which work in our lives to give us hope that love and justice have actual futures.  Amen.

Do We Regard the Omni of Omnipresence?

Last Sunday after  Pentecost: Christ the King Cycle A  proper 29 November 26, 2023
Ezek. 34:11-16, 20-24     Ps.100   
Eph. 1:15-23      Matt. 25:31-46
 
Lectionary Link

We Christians are good at theological theory, but are often not so good at actual practice of Christ-like behaviors.

In our theology, we say God is omnipresent, God is everywhere.  And in our Christology, we say, like St. Paul, Christ is all and in all.  But in our practice, we tend to be more like the proverbial Charlie Brown when he said, "I love mankind; it's people I can't stand."

We have favorite places where we like to find God and Christ.  Many of those places are safe places, which don't demand much from us, and we treat those places as places with seemingly are so privileged that in our practice they seem to exhaust the presence of God and Christ.

And what would those favorite safe places be?  The Bible, the Sacraments, and all things churchy.

We gladly proclaim, "the Word of the Lord," after reading all manner of Scripture readings.  We gladly find the presence of Christ in bread and wine and the sacramental rites.  And if we keep our participation in Word and Sacrament isolated from expanded meanings of Word and Sacrament, we can safely convince ourselves that we are doing God's will and we can feel justified in and by our religious ritual behaviors.

But we cannot selectively limit how and where we want to know the divine presence, the Christly presence.

The parable of Jesus read for today, is also in the Bible and is regarded to be God's word.  This parable is given to us to incentivize us to look beyond our favorite places for knowing, seeing and reverencing the divine.  And where does the parable of Jesus tell us where to find and serve the great Son of Man?

In the thirsty, the hungry, the ones without adequate clothing, and the strangers.  My, my, is this not some communist plot to redistribute the resources to people who did not really earn them?  Should we not build higher walls so that strangers cannot get to us?  The homeless on our streets: do they not represent an embarrassment?  Are they not people with such failed life practice that they can't take care of themselves?  Strangers, hungry people, thirsty people, homeless people seem to threaten us and in our false sense of American individualism, we often blame them for their failure at individual efforts to get their lives together and take care of themselves and their families.

The parable of Jesus does not tell us why people are thirsty, hungry, unclothed, or strangers; the parable simply tells us that they were in these conditions.  We often want to spend time blaming people for being in the conditions that they are as a reason for us to say they don't deserve food, drink, clothing, housing, and a welcome.

Do we want to be the "goats" in the parable of Jesus who go into eternal punishment?  Sounds rather severe.  The language is very strong language but it is the language to incentivize us not to limit the presence of Christ within our favorite biblical passages or within our liturgies.

Today, the Risen Christ is saying to us, "if you are coming for my presence in the preaching of the word and in the bread and the wine, then you also must go forth and find my real presence in the stranger, the hungry, the thirsty, the homeless, and those without adequate clothing."

Let us be rebuked and incentivized today by this parable of Jesus to see Christ as All and in all, especially within the poor, the needy, the strangers and the neglected.  Amen.

Kingdom of God within the Borders of the Epidermis

25 Pentecost A p. 28 November 19, 2023
Judges 4:1-7 Psalm 123
1 Thessalonians 5:1-11 Matthew 25:14-30

Lectionary Link

The parables of Jesus are wisdom allegories to teach in very indirect ways.  They are not like a syllogism of logic that starts with premises and end with logical conclusions.  Rather, they are units which evoke experiential musings.  As stories they relate the inexactness of life situations and asks of listeners and reader to learn the intuitions of the art of living.

The parables are as instructive in what they leave out and they are open-ended in their meanings.  They are teasers and koans to return to in continuous reflection and they take on different meanings which mirror the particular message that we might need at different times in our lives.

The well known parable of the talents is assigned in the fall when most parishes are conducting their stewardship campaigns in doing financial planning for the next year.  Certainly many can and do use the parable of the talents to promote stewardship in the mission of the church.  

Stewardship is not just for raising money for the parish, because it is a very basic message of Jesus.  Life is a gift that is given but it is very undeveloped.  Human lives must be developed, and done so in optimal ways.  The epitaph that none of us wants on our tombstone would be: He had lots of potential.  Imagine a gardener inviting you to his house to view his seed collection.  Lots of seeds but no garden.

In the parable of the talents, the mostly absent boss hands out money to his servants to invest, in amounts of five, two, and one talents.

Those with five and two talents, invest their talents and when the boss returned they had doubled their talents, and were praised highly for their investment efforts.  The servant who had been given one talent confessed that he was afraid of losing it, so in fear he buried it in the ground so that he would at least not present his boss with a loss of his asset.  And so, his one talent was taken from him and given to the one who had doubled his five talents.

This parable bespeaks the law time and growth where change is inevitable and so the quest is to influence the outcomes in time.  This parable is about the seeming cruel law of atrophy; use it or lose it.  We must work in ways to influence positive outcomes in our lives and the belief of Jesus is that we as human beings have significant freedom to influence outcomes in our lives.  Remember that this Gospel literature is being read by an oppressed community who might be intimidated by their circumstance.  What freedom do we have in light of the Caesar's control of our lives and community?

But where is the strength of the realm or kingdom of God most poignantly to be active and influential?  Within the borders of the epidermis of the human body.  The kingdom of God needs have no rival within the epidermis of the human body.  Don't let the outer environment intimidate or steal from the individual who resides at the volitional command center within the borders of the epidermis.

The parable of Jesus is meant to inspire human agency within the realm in which each person has volitional control, namely, within one's own person.

Rather than treat the parable of Jesus as being cruel in its punishment of the man with the uninvested talent, we should merely let the parable inform us about probabilities within the field of freedom in our lives.

One of the important lessons in life is not to let fear paralyze us from developing the gifts of our lives.  Fear is being persuaded more about a negative outcome rather than a positive outcome.  The opposite of fear is faith, and faith is acting toward hopeful outcomes.

This parable highlights one of the central transformations espoused in the Gospel: transforming the energy of fear into the energy of faith.

Fear is based upon the belief that we have no agency to develop better outcomes in our lives.  Faith is being persuaded that we can continuously cooperate with events of grace to invest and invest and invest the gifts of our lives toward better outcomes.

I think the message of Jesus is about the discovery of the events of grace which provide the stimulating power to act persuasively toward better outcomes in our lives.

The message of the parable is an invitation for us to move on from the paralysis of fear to the grace activation of faith, whereby we choose to live celebrating our agency to be better today than yesterday, starting with the kingdom which is found within the borders of our epidermis.  And if we can bring better outcomes within our interior lives, we can begin to effect positive changes in the exterior environments and communities of our lives.

May God help us to the graceful insight of faith as the ideal transformation of the negative energy of fear.  Amen.

Kingdom of Heaven, to Be or Ever Has Been?

24 Pentecost, Cycle A proper 27, November 12, 2023
Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25 Psalm 78
1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 Matthew 25:1-1


Lectionary Link

We have read the parable about the bridesmaid who were prepared and those who weren't and this wisdom parable of Jesus presents to us some insights about the realm of God in our lives.

Those with apocalyptic propensity prefer to use this as the preparation for some cataclysmic end of the world has we know it.  And there are many Christians who resort to a sort of apocalyptic fatalism, one in which their perceived foes are punished and they who are God's preferred get spirited away to rapturous bliss.  The obsession with this kind of apocalypticism is so pronounced, it really seems at odds with a creating loving God who called creation good.  The apocalyptic sects of Christian religions are not environmentalists; "why save the environment if we are soon going to leave this wretched place for a better world?"  As proclaimed "dominionists" they believe the world should be dominated for their benefits and there is very little notion of stewardship care for this world which the creator God of Genesis called "good."

I believe the injunction to be prepared has a fuller meaning than than what the distorted views of the apocalyptic crowd proclaim.

When Jesus proclaimed the Realm of God, he was not proclaiming something new, he was observing what was always already, namely, if this world derives from the plenitude of God then the plenitude of all that is, is the realm of God.  Or, as St. Paul of the Acts of the Apostles reminded us, "we live, and move and have our being in God."  God is our Realm and our kingdom, past, present, and future.

Then why does the notion of the kingdom of heaven seem to be limited to an event or "events" in time?  The events in time have to do with the human perception of what is always, already.   We are always in the Realm of God but we don't always perceive it or live as though we are in God's Realm.

Being prepared for the kingdom or realm of heaven is about how we live toward the future.  The words of Jesus, "the kingdom of heaven will be like this," namely it is a future continuous tense.  The realm of God will be.....

And how are we to live toward what will be?  We are to live in ways of being ready for the future.  In the past, we have lived and moved had our being in God, in the present we live and have our being God , and it will also be such in the future.  

Being prepared is about holistic integration of our lives.  It is to be very practical.  The Boys Scout Motto is "Be prepared."  If one is going camping then one needs to be logistically prepared, with proper attire, proper supplies, and proper skill sets to meet the challenges of the trail and the remote places of the camping sites.

The issue of the wise and foolish bridesmaids in the parable was simply a matter of logistics of having an ample supply of oil for the lamps.  Those who did not have enough oil had a good excuse: "How were we to know that the bridegroom would be delayed?"

And isn't this a main issue of life?  How do we know the timing of future event so as to be properly prepared?

The warning words of Jesus for his early followers was this; you don't need to be prepared for some event of final salvation as to be able to live spiritually healthy lives no matter what befalls. 

The kind of preparation which Jesus asks for is not a fatalistic waiting for some final end of life as we know it, but rather an attitude of faith which can adjust to the actual conditions of life as we know it.

This is a wholistic and holistic kind of faith preparation.  It is integrative of the ways that we have to be prepared to live, and move, and have our being in God, even as such living includes living with all the people of our daily lives and world.  It includes using our past experiences and the experiences of others to anticipate the probabilities of what may yet happen to us.  It is practical and commonsensical; as such it means that human beings are mainly the answers to their own prayers.  There is enough to go around in the world; it is human failure which accounts for great personal needs of so many.  Therefore preparation of realization of the Realm of God is spiritual and moral, because the material world, the world of science and brute facts has to be accompanied with the moral and spiritual realization of the worthwhileness of everyone in God's realm.

From a cursory observation we can say that we are not prepared yet for the Realm of God, because the will of God in the heavenly realm is not yet being done on the earth of the visible realm.

The preparation for the kingdom of heaven for us is to bring the parallel heavenly values of love and justice to the actual surface of this visible world.  We cannot be complainer about not knowing that such things would happen to us; we must be those who are studying the ways of love and justice to be made known in whatever may come.

It is not realistic for us to complain about not knowing the specifics of future events, since the future will be much like the past and the present with the array of probable occurrences.  Preparation is not about pretending that we know specifics of the future, it is about knowing that God is equally present in all times.  If we are prepared in knowing God is present now, then we can carry this preparation to know that God will be present in our futures as well.

The message of the Gospel for us today is that being prepared means living in being God aware.  We prepare for the future by living God aware lives.  Let us be prepared by knowing God as the common great feature of all the times of our lives.  Amen.

Finding the Identity of Identities

23 Pentecost, A p26, November 5, 2023
Micah 3:5-12           Ps. 43
1 Thessalonians 2:9-13,17-20 Matt. 23:1-12

Lectionary Link

 
Because we are people in relationship and location and social settings we come to have many personal identities in our lives.  The list of identities are many and varied: father, mother, brother, sister, son, daughter, uncle, cousin, grandfather, grandmother, aunt, all kinship identities.  But we also have vocational identities: student, teacher, athlete, business man or woman, police officer, priest, and so on.  We receive important identity from what we do.  We receive identity from where we live: other side of the tracks, ghetto, rich neighborhood, gated community, and blue collar neighborhood.  We receive identity from associations and institutions: alumni, Mason, parish, diocese, denomination, and faith community.

Identities can be a positive or negative thing.  They can be something that we are proud of or ashamed of.  They can be how we regard the very worth of our lives.  They can be seen as how people regard our worth.

Our social lives might be regarded as trying to clamor for the best and highest identities.  We want to be part of the "in-crowd."  I am important because I am father, son, in such a such a family.  I am a businessman and millionaire.  I live in a very expensive house.  I went to the best schools.

But what if we are socially stuck with some not so fortunate identities?  Someone poor, someone uneducated, someone who has cancer, someone unemployed?

Identities which are socially forged can become the very basis of personal esteem and personal self worth, and the way in which others in society regard us.

The words of Jesus from our appointed Gospel address the identity issue for the members of the early Jesus Movement.  Many of those who followed Jesus had less than positive identities within their social settings.  Jesus appealed to those who were not given high regard in society.

The Jesus Movement was a movement to get people restored to their primary identity.  And what was that?  Created in the image of God, and therefore a child of God, first and foremost.  So this is where each person begins their identity.  Every other identity is simply how one is called to manifest the primary identity of life, namely being a child of God.  How am I a child of God as a father, mother, teacher, lawyer, business person, student, son, or daughter?

The words of Jesus were not meant to deny or get rid of the other identities in our lives; they were to remind us that whatever we do, whomever we are, we are first and foremost children of God, and therefore in our being and doing we are strive to perform our identities in godly ways?  And how do we do this?  By loving God, our neighbor as our self.

The Gospel message for us today is to found our identity upon being children of God and then in our various callings in life, strive to be godly in our behaviors, and seek our esteem in being children of God and treating others with that same esteem.  Amen.

Moses the Law Giver Is Dead; Long Live the Law

22 Pentecost, Cycle A Proper 25, October 29, 2023
Deuteronomy 34: 1-12 Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17
1 Thessalonians 2:1-8 Matthew 22:34-46

Lectionary Link

How many law, rules, and regulations govern nearly every facet of our lives?   Seeming endless laws and unless we are legal experts or who have access to specialists, we might be breaking laws of which we are ignorant.  The church has laws, called canon laws and people can get into church trouble if they don't obey the canon laws.

We are familiar with the Big Ten, the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments.  But the Torah lists a total of 613 commandments and these recommended behaviors and procedures were to be followed for the various areas of life for the members of tribes of Israel.  Certainly the judges, priests and scribes would continually have to be consulted in order to certify one's compliance with all these commandments.

We have read the account of the death of Moses, perhaps, the most famous Law Man of history.  Moses received the Law and one can imagine that the best case scenario is to have present both the law and the law giver.  When Moses was alive, he was like a living Torah, a living law and he was present to adjudicate and address any legal situation.

But what happens when the Law Giver dies?   Moses is gone; long live the Law.  The textual law is what is left after Moses is gone and there needed to be successive replacement figures for Moses.  There arose judges, priests, scribes, teachers, and prophets to be the living interpreters of the law.

The basic insight of the law is good order in all things.  There are too many bumper cars in life with the tendency of wanting to be in the same place at the same time.  So there needs to wise application for the avoidance of harm, chaos, and disorder in the world.

We can appreciate the basic insight of the law as the need for order and the recommended behaviors for good order and for the teaching of the good habits of order.

But the basic insight of the law can be lost; we can sully our relationship to the law.  We can turn the need for good order into legalism without humanity serving purposes.   We can accumulate thousands of law and in the proliferation of so many rules and law, we can lose the good purpose of law.  We can come to regard the performance of rules as being the certification of certain people's privilege in society.  "I am good because I publicly perform these laws.  Aren't I good, aren't those who don't keep the rules like I do, bad?"

When laws are made to highlight my goodness then the true motive of the law is lost.  In the quest for the best laws among the 613 commandments and among all the new rules and regulations that have come to human communities around the world, Jesus offers the secret to good legal thinking.  He offers the secret to how to discern good behaviors of speech and deed when one does not have access to the legal scholars or priestly casuists.  What is the secret?  Love.  St. Paul wrote that love fulfills the law.

Jesus harkened back to the spirit of the law which was present from the times of the story of Moses.  Love God.  That is how we grow our hearts.  God is too big for us to get our feelings around, but we keep stretching to increase our capacity to love by loving a much greater than us God.   And in this effort, we are asking for the experience of grace.  We seek to love God whom we don't see, to receive grace to love the ones whom we do see, namely our neighbors.  And we seek to love them even as we apply appreciative love for ourselves.

Jesus gives us the key to living lawfully, even when we may not know all of the rules and regulations.  In discerning how we should speak and act, we ask ourselves, "is my word and deed consistent with loving God and my neighbor as myself?"

The interlocutors of Jesus did not get the love message; they preferred to argue about the theological issue of the Messiah.

And isn't that what Christians often do with each other?  Why don't you believe and articulate the doctrine of your faith in the way that I do, the correct way?

We often would much rather look for theological reasons to disagree and to dislike each other, whereas, Jesus reminds us about the basics: Love God, and love your neighbors as yourself.  Amen.

Kingdom of God and a Worldwide Theocracy

21 Pentecost, Cycle A, Proper 24, October 22, 2023
Exodus 33:12-23 Psalm 99 1
Thessalonians 1:1-10 Matthew 22:15-22

Lectionary Link

Governments and nations built around divine laws are often called theocracies.  Some Islamic states aspire to have the religious law of Sharia be also the governing law of the entire country.  And in thinking that, what God thinks is best for us is also best for everyone else in the world.  There is an impulse in regional theocracies for them to spread and become universal.

The telling of the event of Mount Sinai originated within the people of Hebraic traditions and it revealed the divine right of the Law of God which is accompanied by an account of the relationship between Moses and God.  God is too great for human comprehension and so the saying, "No one has ever seen God."  No one has the capacity to equal God's greatness.  In the story of Moses' relationship with God, he was not about to see the face of God or directly perceive God even though he made the impossible request to do so.  In the story, Moses is given permission to see the back side of God.  This bespeaks the Orthodox expression that God cannot be known in God's essence, but only through the divine energies, the emanations or the things around God which can be known or revealed to humanity.  The invisible, unseeable God can be known in the Godly effects.

The theocracy of Hebraic religion is the discovery of divine laws or rules of recommended behaviors for people who center their lives around a belief in the One God.  Such laws within community could be construed to be political structure for the stable perpetuation of that community throughout time.

But was such a theocracy for the Jews to be just for them?  Or were they to be a hybrid proto-community for bringing such a theocracy to the entire world?  The prophets proclaimed the Temple to be a house of prayer for all peoples.  The self evidential logic around the belief in One God, is that the One God is for all.  The people of Israel were to be the politically exemplary society to bring the witness of their One God to the entire world.

The record of the Hebrew Scriptures indicates that by their own assessment of their own history, they failed to live up to the standards of God's law that had been given to them.  Often the kings of Israel and Judah did not keep even the first and most important commandment, namely the requirement of loyalty to the One God.

Nations with other gods who also gave their rulers divine right of rule impinged upon the people of Israel who did not ever seem to be able to achieve complete success in implementing a theocratic society built around a divinely revealed Law.

One might say that the Roman Empire was quite successful in attaining a worldwide theocracy simply because the belief in many gods and goddesses could be compatible with the main political theocracy, the cult of the Emperor.  If the Caesar is declared to be a god and son of a god, a savior of the world, and the one to enforce peace, one could see an effective political theocracy.  The wedding of the cult of the Emperor with the genius of Roman law truly provided the world with a worldwide structure.  The Emperor's cult was perhaps a proto-catholic religion to unite the cult of Emperor devotion with political and military power.

Jesus of Nazareth, born into family and country with a failed theocracy provides us a tradition of a hidden total kingdom of God, co-existing with the existing Roman kingdom of a successful theocracy of the cult of the Caesar.

The early followers of Jesus and the Jews had to forge their identities with the acceptance of being oppressed communities that had to survive within the successful theocracy of the Roman Emperor cult.  One of the ways in which the Emperor related to all of the people of the empire was through collecting taxes.

One of the most visible signs of unity in the kingdom of the Roman Empire was the image or the face of the Emperor superimposed upon the coinage.  The image, the icon, of the Emperor was proof of the Emperor's powerful presence throughout his world empire.  It was proof that he had power to collect taxes, that is, to exact from the life revenue of everyone within the Caesar realm.

One can see the obvious question that would come to Jesus and his followers.  One of the most basic messages in the logia or sayings of Jesus was his proclamation of the kingdom of God.  "So here we have it Jesus, the kingdom of God or the kingdom of the Caesar god, how do you negotiate between these two perspectives?"  And should those who claim allegiance to the kingdom of God proclaimed by Jesus pay taxes to the Caesar-god of the empire?  Is one betraying the One God proclaimed and exemplified by Jesus if one pays taxes to the Caesar-god?

This was the question posed to Jesus and I think it highlights perhaps a dilemma for people who believed in One God who were being oppressed and forced into compliant empire behaviors by the Caesar-god and his forces.

The question to Jesus was about whether the Caesar should be resisted and rebelled against.  And the answer of Jesus is really a wisdom insight based upon some very ancient Hebraic wisdom.  What is that insight?  Caesar is only a human being, not a god, but the image of God resides on the Caesar.  So it is the duty of Caesar and all people made in the image of God to pay their lives as God's coinage to God.  Let Caesar have his coins in his empire game; the image of God is upon everyone and so everyone including the Emperor belonged to the One God.

This subtle wisdom answer reveals the secret of the growth of early Christianity.  The words of Jesus were not to overthrow the Caesar but to appeal the total divine ground on which everyone always already lives.  This Gospel of Matthew came to textual form after Paul wrote for his community in Rome to pray for the authorities in Rome.  The Jesus Movement was an under-the-radar-movement which ironically rode the coattails of Roman world expansion such that the Roman ability to connect the entire known world through roads, transportation, and administration became also the media for the spread and the travel of the message of Jesus Christ which was this, the image of God is upon everyone, and Jesus came to make that evident.

Today people may still try to make their local practice of religion with all its specificities into the one practice of religion for everyone.  The positive feature of this insight is that it is charitable to regard one's best gift and insight as being available to everyone else.  The negative is that it is too easy to over identify the cultural details of one's own situation as being coercively absolute for everyone else.  The fracture of the Christian religion into so many expressions is proof of the arrogance of trying to make the very local, the universal for everyone.

The Gospel for us today is this, like Moses, we are only located to see a very partial facet of the "back side of the divine," and we should not presume otherwise.  Like St. Paul, we can remain as humble relativists in confessing, "Now I only see in part."  We only see the part of the Whole, and we should be humble about this, and in our humility we should affirm that the kingdom of God is so vast and such an inward iconic reality, that it can co-exist with the incredible faith differences which occur in our world.

The Gospel Jesus says to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesars; the anthropomorphic stamped upon every human product.  At the same time, we have the privilege to render unto God the things that are God's because the image of God is a rendering or a branding of everyone as belonging to God.  The Gospel message of Jesus is that you and I have the privilege to be a part of everything including ourselves being rendered back to the everlasting God because the endless future One is the only One with the duration to truly include and collect all in All.

Let us be those whose lives are gladly without resistance or competition, rendered back to God today.  Amen.